Packing It Up

I'm leaving tomorrow (but I could leave today)

This week’s a quick one. I’m moving tomorrow. The car’s packed, and it’s got a new battery and new oil and a new alternator for the one that burnt out suddenly three days ago on my way to my last hike. Knock on wood, but it’s a good car. It’s used to hauling heavy cargo. I’ve been across the country six times and up and down it four times with it since I bought the car in 2021 with a hundred thousand miles on it, and now it’s got 174. Is that a lot for a trail worker? My guess is no. If I didn’t get sick it’d be even higher.

I believe I’m pretty good at picking up and moving after all those trail seasons. I know what to expect: the last days at the old place, the accelerated passage of time as nostalgia and drudgery collide, the days on the road that feel like weeks. Here in Connecticut, the buds are just starting to appear on the red maples and tiny green circles are pushing up through the leaf litter. But spring still takes its time here, and this year it isn’t even that unseasonably warm. So that makes the move a little tough. In a few more weeks we’ll get the trout lilies and violets, the cherry and apple blossoms, the pepperbush and the trillium. The warblers, the vireos, the wood thrushes. Why not stay for one more? But there’s always one more. That’s the problem with loving nature: never a good time to leave.

Last night, as a send-off, my family and I ordered Chinese and watched A Complete Unknown together. I love Bob Dylan, and I loved the film. No spoilers, but it’s a story about change—specifically Dylan’s legendary change from a folk icon into a rock pioneer at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The deeper story is about the path Dylan chose and the one he declined. There’s a great scene where Pete Seeger, played perfectly by Edward Norton, tells Dylan about how folk music could topple the weight that had crushed society for so long. Seeger, for all his out-of-touch moralizing, was a true believer who had seen this happen bit by bit, person by person. But Dylan wanted to remake himself, not society. He had already changed his own past in order to change his future. “I don’t believe you,” he mythically said to the boos at Newport, as Seeger just as mythically tried to chop his guitar cables with an axe. How did that turn out for all of us? Don’t ask me, I was trying to see the type of axe.

The place I’m moving is different than anywhere I’ve lived before. That is: below the 41st parallel. It’s warm and green and low in elevation and relief. It has flowers and birds I can scarcely comprehend, landscapes that exist nowhere else on earth. Naturally, it has trails too, but they’re strange. No rock, no timber, no switchbacks, no drains (nowhere to drain to). They seem to complicate the notion of hiking, the way a “camp” implies a whole other universe of backcountry living to a family of hunters. Indeed, there are landscapes in which even strong legs and fortitude don’t quite cut it. Wouldn’t it be easier, they seem to say, to just take a boat or an ATV? Why would you want to go out there?

No spoilers, but I’ll write about it soon. We get there on Sunday, and I’ll have a nice spring drive through my beloved eastern hardwood forest to see me off. I’m excited. I’ve lived my entire life in the temperate domain of American outdoor culture: roots and rocks underfoot, trees and summits above, dotted lines on the maps. This next chapter promises something completely new. Or does it only feel that way? Perhaps there’s really not much difference between the high mountain wilderness and the impenetrable swamp. (Or the tame Connecticut woodland.) Perhaps a dive on a reef is much the same as a multipitch climb. Perhaps bear spray works on alligators. (Editor’s note: it does not.)

Or, perhaps I’m crazy for moving so far from the high country I know and love, the forested wilderness, the cycle of seasons, and I’ll hate it, come running back at the first opportunity, and never write a single word about it, like Edward Abbey after his season in the Everglades. Who knows. But as Bob sang, he who is not busy being born is busy dying. The Smokies aren’t too far, and the car’s running great.